Birth Parents and Ancestors - Is There A Cut-Off Age When We No Longer Want or Need to Know About Them?

The short answer is, "no". The long answer (which is a discussion of observations about how the growth process continues to take place long past our twenties) follows:

Some people will tell you they just don't care, and don't need to know, who biological parents and/or what any ancestral roots are; but it's pretty common (probably the majority, I'd think) who want to know at one point or another. Sometimes it's earlier. Sometimes it's later. It's just something a lot of people just want/need to know. The question I aim to answer here is whether there's a cut-off point for someone's wanting/needing to know. This was a question posted online, although the question was about learning about an unknown biological father. I've expanded the focus to include more than one biological parent or family member, as well as ancestral history in general.

My personal guess would be there is not. The individual who posted the question is in his forties and seems to be surprised at how important it now is to him to learn the identity of his biological father. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone in his forties might suddenly decide he wants/needs to know his biological roots.

Someone I know told me something a clergy member said when her husband "had some issues" in his forties (not related to finding a bio parent, although he happens to be adopted). In any case, the clergy member (who was someone who had counseled people and families for years) said how common it is for people who have had things they haven't dealt with earlier in their life to find that, once forty, those things seem to come to the surface and call to be addressed.

I don't spend a lot of time paying a lot of attention to concepts or observations shared with me, second-hand; but at the time the individual in question raised this issue, I saw no reason to doubt it. At the time, I wasn't close to my forties, so I just accepted the words as "most likely accurate".

Having had a lot more life experience and a lot more exposure to people forty and over than I did then, I've made some observations myself, and they seem to go along with what that clergy member I never met said about the forties and "issues".

If you think about it, we spend the first twenty or so years of our lives just reaching "full maturity" when it comes to physiological growth/development. It's easy enough to see that a child is nowhere near maturity simply because of his outward appearance (among other things). As we get closer and closer to maturity, though, most of the maturation process has been done; so we look, act, and are adults in most ways. The finishing touches on the maturation process are, for the most part, things we can't see when we look at someone else, or when we look in the mirror. So, an eighteen-year-old may certainly look and be grown-up in a lot of ways, even if there are some finishing touches that must go on things like a skeleton and certain parts of the brain.

In any case, people look (and, again, are) grown up in so many ways at, say, eighteen. Still, between eighteen and early- to mid- twenties, those finishing touches are being added to the "inside"/"invisible" maturation process. As with all matters of human growth and development, people generally mature according to a basic schedule, but with some limited variation resulting from individual differences. Just as with growth in height and weight, some circumstances or conditions can slow down someone who otherwise would have developed according to that "standard schedule". With height and weight, a child who doesn't receive good nutrition may not grow as well as he otherwise would have. With the kind of maturation that takes place between the teen years and full maturity, an individual who has spent too many of his teen years abusing drugs or alcohol, for example, may lose "maturation time" when his normal maturation process is "detoured" from the normal things in life, and kinds of thinking, that help move a young person to maturity. These are just examples of the ways in which that schedule of human development can be thrown off.

For the purposes of this discussion, assume that nothing has thrown off anyone or anything in the normal maturation process. Keep in mind that I'm not disregarding individual differences in rates of maturation, and that the phrase, "in general", should accompany all of the following observations.

It seems obvious to me that we spend our teen years working on who we, as people, are, or want to be. It's a time for considering all the things we've been told, or learned, and (to use a casual phrase) "put our own spin on them" for ourselves and our own use. We may start with the basic issues of life (personal values, preferences, plans for what we want in our future, own self-esteem, etc.) in our early- or mid- teens and work our way up to the more philosophical matters of our place in the universe, the meaning of life, and any number of things-philosophical.

At the same time we're working on maturing on the inside, we're also working on the social/away-from-home aspects of a life as an individual separate from our parents. We start to get more experience/practice with things like socializing as almost-adults, working, taking on more responsibilities, and being in relationships. When we were three we had little "outside life". When we were four or five we began getting a little more exposure to the "outside world", maybe with playmates or time spent in kindergarten, at birthday parties, or even eating out at a local restaurant.

It's really in our teens that we get to take our almost-grown-up selves out into the outside world and start functioning in it under our own, independent, steam. Secondary schools aim to facilitate this stage of the maturation process with things like extra-curricula activities, social functions (like proms) and team projects.

Awareness of the world and social issues, matters, and injustices tends to grow as we move from being younger teens to older teens. It's as if we've had a well established idea (or so we think) of who and what we are for long enough that we start thinking about the world outside our inner selves and personal lives. At some point, though, most people begin to look past the world (the larger world, not their own) around them and begin putting on those finishing touches of being a grown-up human being - figuring out the philosophical stuff and the meaing of life in general. It's not at all unusual for people in their early twenties to feel as if they haven't found meaning in their life. Neither is it unusual for people of that age to be surprised to discover that reaching adulthood isn't anywhere near as fulfilling in a lot of ways as they'd once imagined it would be.

Part of getting our lives and ourselves to where we want them to be is building our life once we've reached adulthood, and it's often in our twenties that we start to take steps toward actually building, and seeing some evidence of, an adult life and self that is beginning to take shape. It's in our twenties (especially early- and mid- twenties that we tend to start putting some of the bricks into place in the foundation on which our future adult years and "outer life" will be built (for good or ill). Those are also the years when we start to see our inner lives, outer selves, outer lives, and larger lives begin to fall into place. In other words, we take our own place in the world around that time.

Again, without disregarding individual differences in lives and people, it's common for people to start laying that foundation for adult life in their twenties, make progress in their twenties, and find their life more fully "up and running" once they reach thirty or a little beyond it. In our thirties, we've been all grown up for quite some time. With families and careers having come into full bloom (at least in many cases) our thirties can be a time when we feel we're through with any processing of our inner selves. It's a time, too, when life can be particularly demanding. "Heavily entrenched" in adult responsibilities and challenges, both our inner selves and out selves are often awfully busy in our thirties. If we've built up an extremely large set of responsibilities we can feel pressured to meet them. If we haven't built up all the responsibilities and aspects of what we'd hoped we'd have in our thirties we can feel pressured to achieve them. After all, once we pass thirty-five, forty is looming. Before we're forty we think we know what forty will be and will mean. We don't.

It's at forty, I think, when a lot of people start to notice that life gets a little less demanding on a day-to-day basis. Forty is young, so it certainly isn't a matter of winding down in preparation of retirement. By forty, though, people whose children were young in their twenties or thirties have children who are either grown or grown enough not to require the kind of minute-by-minute focus that babies and younger children do. Career-wise or work-wise, people tend to be in a different place once they've reached forty. At forty, a lot of people have gotten to a place where they're really well established (which, even in the thirties, many people are not; especially in the early thirties). Those who aren't well established in a chosen career, or who have had time to discover their chosen career wasn't the best choice, can feel, at forty, that they now have the time to do something new. At forty, people who have had jobs, but not careers, have often found ways or things that add to a life, or support it, separate from any career aims.

While this may not be the case for all people in their forties, people at forty and over often discover they finally have some time to start thinking about their life and anything else they haven't had much time to think about over the last twenty or so years. Forty, itself, may be an age with which people feel a need to start reassessing everything in life (from the inner stuff to the outer stuff); because, while it's easy and common enough in our thirties to look and feel like we're in our twenties, the number, "40", has a way to shaking us out of our not-thinking-much-about-our-age stage (our thirties) and shocking us into being more aware that we are, beyond the shadow of a doubt, no longer kids and only going to get older from there (if we're lucky).

Factored into our forties thinking, I think, is also everything we've learned from childhood on, but especially, perhaps, in those twenty years of living life as a "full grown" adult. The simple answer to this piece is hoping to answer is that in our forties we often simply have time to start thinking about some of the stuff that we never thought a lot about it in the past.

Just as we land in the world of young adults in our early twenties, look around, and start to take inventory of what it is we need to be doing; we land at forty into the world of middle-aged adults and do much the same thing. The difference is that we twenty years of adult life, issues, and building behind us. We're not longer facing that same kind of blank slate that we did when we first "landed" into the world of adult life. We've learned things. We've had new experiences. We've been through discoveries, hard lessons, and sometimes even experiencing things that seemed like magic or miracles. If our life until then has been whole and full, we've often "lived and learned even more" than a lot of other people seem to have. On the other hand, if our life until then hasn't felt all that whole and full, it's at forty that we may start to ask ourselves why that it and what we might do to change it.

Maybe it isn't even always on a conscious level that we start to think about the things we do once we hit the forties. Maybe it's just that we're coming from a very different place, deep inside, at forty, than we are at twenty-two. I suppose it's the kind of thing that happens when one person lives on a tiny income and has one set of worries, while another person lives on a well-above-average income and has another set of worries. Or, another comparison may be the person who goes to work and answers someone's phone all day versus the person runs a multi-billion-dollar corporation and has to worry about the impact he has on thousands of lives.\

Again, without disregarding individual differences, forty is an age that can be kind of confusing because we know "in our heads" what the number, "40", means; but we may have discovered that it turns out we still feel much the same as we did at twenty. Still, we know we're smarter than we were back then. It doesn't help if we look in the mirror and pretty much see the same person we've always seen, as opposed to seeing the person who would be "old beyond recognition" that we may have imagined when we were twenty.

The wholeness, emptiness, accomplishments, and regrets of twenty years of adult life are there, coloring our thinking. If we have children we've discovered that we've got a whole other part of us for each child to be processing, as well as a whole set of worries and hopes for each child. A lot of us have discovered, much to our surprise, that when children turn into grown-ups we're still very much parents forever; and the worries associated with having children tend to change in nature but not number. In fact, that number can increase. Often, by, or in, our forties, we've discovered that we weren't really completely finished growing at even twenty-five either. We've often discovered that we've grown as individual and grown along with our children if we have them. Watching parents age and/or losing parents brings its own kind of growth and processing, and it's often in our forties when we begin to face these issues, which were once something we'd only imagined (and yet couldn't really imagine, and certainly hadn't had to figure out how to process and/or live with without too much sadness).

By forty, many of us have more than once had to also figure out how to deal with one life derailment or another. Some people are more fortunate than others. Some have had more than the usual share of derailment long before forty, or even twenty. In general, however, forty is the age when derailments of one sort or another have begun to add up for a lot of people.

Something that adds to how confusing forty can feel is knowing how far away it still is from sixty or sixty-five. Forty can feel young-enough-but-not young. It can also feel old-enough-but-not-old".

My own theory (well, actually, it's not really my theory at all but rather what I've come to accept and believe) about aging, growth, the maturation process, and life is that we live the first forty or so so years truly maturing (while also growing up in the first twenty), and we live the second forty (or more) years living as completely mature individual (while also aging). Another part of that concept, or else a separate one, is that even once we've reached complete maturity (at whatever age that is) we never stop growing, whether or not we're someone who tries to grow or resists it. Young, old, or on our death-beds, we grow (whether we like it or not) in ways we can only discover as we get to the next stage of growth.

Forty, to me, seems like the time when we still have a large part of our life ahead of us, but when we've lived enough of that life to see a need to do a little "mental re-organizing", inventory-taking, and sometimes cleaning out.

In our forties we often have children who are old enough that it's easy to imagine them growing up and/or having children. That may be the age at which many of us begin thinking beyond our own personal life and start thinking about the "spin-off" families that will come from our own, the generations that may follow, and the continuity of being able to offer our children facts that may provide them with the best sense of grounding and roots we can offer them. That may also be a time when, if we don't know much about our own roots, we become more aware of it.

In my thirties (when my children were babies and grade-school age), I wrote up a medical history for me, my husband, and them in the event something were to happen to me. I'd save things from their childhood years, or from my own childhood, so that they could have them when they grew up.

When I was in my forties I found myself writing other things for them and any future grand-children, just so I could capture for them things that went on in our lives and/or in the world . I imagined how nice, and how personal, it would feel for a grown child or their own child to find something I'd shared sometime in the future. That was the extent to which I thought beyond my own life, for the most part.

I was raised by my birth parents, but I didn't have much information about my grandparents or anyone who came before them at all. I never knew my grandmothers and had only a few facts about anyone past my own two parents, their siblings, or parents. I knew my parents, their siblings, and my two grandfathers (for awhile), and I had little interest in knowing more than the few things I already did about any people farther back then they. As it happens, one of those experiences in my own life is having become the mother of one adopted child. This meant having to figure out, and process, how I could help my eldest son have the same sense of belonging to which every child in this world is entitled.

I spent the two decades of my son's growing-up years, thinking about how to present what information or perspective I should present to him. Even with all that thinking about the roles of birth parents/family, genetics, nurturing, and how my own culture had impacted the person I am; I still never cared a lot about any of those dead ancestors or what their story was.

Well, you know I said that we don't know the ways in which we'll grow until we get to the stage where that kind of growth will take place? Somewhere between my fortieth birthday and fiftieth birthday (and I'm still immature enough, and enough the same vain fourteen-year-old I once was to be willing to admit exactly how long ago it was that I had that birthday), I found myself the mother of kids who weren't just freshly minted adults, but of kids in the mid-twenties.

Having found reaching "The Big Five O" a bigger kick-in-the-head than reaching "The Big Four O" had been for me, it was after reaching fifty that I found myself aware of the fact that "the next thing was hitting the sixties". I found myself even more aware of exactly how quickly thirty years of adult life does fly by.

While having babies and young children can often make us particularly aware of the world beyond our own little existence and family, having grown children can make us more aware of future grandchildren and the future in general (as well as the fact that there will most likely be a future in which we are but a memory to someone in some way). That world we'd once worried about sending our children out into is a world in which they now live; and that future we'd once only imagined (or hoped for, or even feared) for our babies and toddlers has become a reality.

By the time we've been in the middle years for ten or fifteen years, we've got quite a bit of past and growth to recall and learn from, and we our feet tend to be firmly grounded in that once difficult-to-imagine juxtaposition of "future" and "real life". We still can't foresee the future, but we no longer have such a difficult time seeing how blank-slate futures turn into present realities with the simple passing of one day to another. It's both a grand and simple concept, and the need to grasp and process it can seem to increase as we have more and more reality behind us and less and less imagined future ahead of us.

While I found the forties a time in which I was more aware of a blank-slate future for my children and theirs; and while I had thought I'd mostly figured out my little place in the Universe long, long, before that; it was when I turned fifty (and well after I'd thought I had all the facts, stories, writing, and mementos in place for my children's future), it seemed to be turning fifty that made me start thinking about providing more information from my parents' and other family members' past and roots.

Having lost both parents, all aunts and uncles, and now a couple of older cousins who had some of that information, I realized that if I didn't dig it up it would be lost forever. Even with that, though, I was, at first, thinking mostly about just my own parents, their siblings, and the stories of extended family that had made up my childhood. With the benefit of the Internet, I came up with some pictures and information of some of the most significant aspects of my family, and I was pleased to know I could provide that information to my children.

Well, proof-positive that I'm still growing came over the last year or so when my niece was approaching her own fortieth birthday and had begun delving into ancestry information in order to be able to provide her own children with it. Her eldest daughter had reached her teens years, and she has three younger children coming along.

Thanks to my niece's hard work and months and months worth of time, I saw facts and faces about my ancestors that I'd never seen or heard about before - all the way back to the 1600's and beyond - on my mother's side of the family. Just as I'd previously come to face to face with the way blank-slate futures turn into reality, I had suddenly come face to face with the fact that the past was reality for all who lived in it. More importantly, for the first time in my life I really grasped (not just on an intellectual level, but on a deeper level) that I am all that I am, and my children are all that they are, because of so much of what went on long before any of us were ever born. As someone who is fascinated by history, I wouldn't think seeing myself within the context of a family history should have been something that took so long - but it did. (Call me, "a late bloomer", I guess).

In any event, having suddenly "met" the people and stories of my mother's family's past, I realized how important it was to me to then find out more about my father's side of the family, a and my children's father's side of their family.

My grown children and I closely studied that the family photo of my great-grandmother and her large family. Since we didn't know which, of all those people, was my great-grandmother, my daughter sent a message to her busy, older, cousin to ask. We laughed when my niece's reply came back, "It's the little one in the back who looks just like your mother." We saw people who had a mouth like my son has in that picture, as well. The people in that picture were real, and that small, young, woman in the back row had eventually gone on to have ten children, and lose several of them.

And so, even having already passed my fiftieth birthday (and having thought I'd done pretty much most the growing I was likely to do), life events (namely, my niece's reaching her own growth stage in life) had suddenly made me aware of the fact that, while it may be nice to leave for those who come after me, all that information about the life that I've experienced myself and the people who have touched it; there is really no true continuity for those who come after me without tying them to a past that was written long before I was born, and that will remain as it is long after I'm gone, and once I, too, am a part of it.

One might wonder why someone who has always otherwise been such a thoughtful and family-focused individual would take so long to grasp the importance of ancestral roots within the context of one's own life and one's children's. I would attribute my own late blooming in this area to the fact that I was raised in a rock-solid family with a rock-solid sense of identity and sureness that didn't lend themselves to leanings to search beyond what seemed like immediate history and an unquestioned sense of belonging. I had other things to think about, and do, in my twenties and thirties; not the least of which was spending twenty years trying to sort out and process the role of my son's (the adopted one's) biological "story" and roots (not just for him, but for his brother and sister who both shared most things, and yet not some birth-related things, with their brother.

Life circumstances and events have a way of altering the routes we take on our road to growth. They also have a way of helping us grow in ways we otherwise would not have had it not been for those events or circumstances.

Having adopted one child from infancy, having delivered two of them myself, and having lost one at 20 weeks or pregnancy were all things that combined to make me see things like ancestral roots and biological backgrounds as meaningless in so many ways. Someone without children may have had more time, younger, to think about something like ancestry. Someone with only biological children may have reached the stage I have sooner than I. A parent of only adopted children might have reached it earlier - or not at all, if there was no hope of finding ancestral information.

I guess it has been in keeping with the human thing of growing as we reach one stage or another in own, individual, lives that is the reason I've never thought much about ancestral roots until now. Now, too (and even though I've done this to some extent in the past), I'm in the process of figuring out how to share my perspective on the impact of my own biological roots on the life of a son who has different biological roots than I, but who has been raised with a heart and soul that, without question, are linked through my parents and to those who came before them.

It occurs to me that while the forties may be the decade in which we put finishing touches on our families, our lives, and our very grown-up selves; it may be the fifties in which we think beyond just ourselves and our immediate families and begin to see not just where we, as individuals, fit in this world and Universe, but where we, as part of our ancestral chain, fit within the context of the world, the Universe, and time.

Maybe it's not until we have firmly established families, maturity, and roots in the long ago past, that we reach a stage where we've tied up all those loose ends of the maturation process; and feel we've finished up the business of doing for our families what it has taken us that fifty or so years to do for ourselves.

In answer to that question about whether there's a cut-off point for wanting/needing to know who our biological parent(s) is/was; or whether there's a cut-off point for wanting/needing to know about our ancestral roots; I'm fairly confident in saying that I truly do not believe there is such a cut-off point. In fact (and I suppose in defense of my apparent late-blooming), I can't help but think that it is when we take the time to grow according to the schedule that life gives us, we can, perhaps, be that much more confident that we've grown, and continue to grow, according to plan.